THE WORCESTER MAIL, 1805. After J. A. Atkinson.
Mail-coaches continued to go toll-free to the very last in England, although from 1798 they had paid toll in Ireland. In Scotland, too, the Trusts were treated with tardy justice, and in 1813 an Act was passed repealing the exemption in that kingdom. But what the Post Office relinquished with one hand it took back with the other, clapping on a halfpenny additional postage for each Scotch letter. It was like the children’s game of “tit-for-tat.” But it did not end here. The Trusts raised their tolls against the mail-coaches, and smiled superior. It was then the Department’s call, and it responded by immediately taking off a number of the mails. That ended the game in favour of St. Martin’s-le-Grand.
Although Parliament never repealed the exemption for the whole of the United Kingdom, it caused an estimate to be prepared of the annual cost of paying tolls, should it ever be in a mind to grant the Trusts that relief. It thus appeared, from the return made in 1812, that the cost for Scotland would have been £11,229 16s. 8d.; for England, £33,536 2s. 3d.; and for Wales, £5224 3s. 10d.: total, £49,990 2s. 9d. per annum.
The mails, travelling as they did throughout the night, were subject to many dangers. They were brilliantly lighted, generally with four, and often with five, lamps, and cast a very dazzling illumination upon the highway. It is true that no certainty exists as to the number of lamps mail-coaches carried, and that old prints often show only two; so that the practice in this important matter probably varied on different routes and at various times. But the crack mails at the last certainly carried five lamps—one on either side of the fore upper quarter, one on either side of the fore boot, and another under the footboard, casting a light upon the horses’ backs and harness. These radiant swiftnesses, hurtling along the roads at a pace considerably over ten miles an hour, were highly dangerous to other users of the roads, who were half-blinded by the glare, and, alarmed by the heart-shaking thunder of their approach and fearful of being run down, generally drove into the ditches as the least of two evils. The mails were then, as electric tramcars and high-powered motor-cars are now, the tyrants of the road.
But they were not only dangerous to others. Circumstances that ought never to have been permitted sometimes rendered them perilous to all they carried. The possibilities of that time in wrong-doing are shown in the practice of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn (who assuredly was not the only one) being allowed to send his refractory carriage-horses to the mails, to be steadied. On such occasions the passengers from Oswestry found themselves in for a wild start and a rough stage, and Sir Watkin had the steam taken out of his high-mettled horses at an imminent risk to the lives and limbs of the lieges.
From 1825, when the era of the fast day-coaches began, the mails gradually lost the proud pre-eminence they had kept for more than forty years. Even though they had been accelerated from time to time as roads improved, they went no quicker than the new-comers, and very often not so quick, from point to point. They suffered the disabilities of travelling by night, when careful coachmen dared not let their horses out to their best speed, and of being subject to the delays of Post Office business; and so, although they might, and did, make wonderful speed between stages, the showing on the whole journey could not compare with the times of the fast day-coaches, which halted only for changing horses and for meals, and, enjoying the perfection of quick-changing, often got away in fifty seconds from every halt. Going at more seasonable hours, the day-coaches now began to seriously compete with the mails, whose old-time supporters, although still sensible of the dignity of travelling by mail, were equally alive to the comfort and convenience of going by daylight. Modern writers, enlarging upon the times of our ancestors, lay great stress upon the endurance our hearty grandfathers “cheerfully” displayed, and show us great, bluff, burly, red-cheeked men, who enjoyed this long night-travelling. But that is an absurdity. They did not enjoy it; they were not all bluff and burly; and that they welcomed the change that gave them swift travelling by day instead of night is obvious from the instant success of the fast day-coaches, and from the later business-history of the mails. Mail-contractors, who in the prosperous days of no competition were screwed down by the Post Office to incredible mileage figures, began to grumble; but for long they grumbled in vain. Even in 1834 the Post Office continued to pay only 2d. a mile on 42 mails, 1½d. a mile on 34, and only one received as much as 4d. The Liverpool and Manchester carried the mailbags for nothing, and three actually paid the Post Office for the privilege. At this time the old rule forbidding more than three outside passengers on the mails was relaxed. This indulgence began in Scotland, where the contractors, in consideration of the sparseness of the population and the scarcity of chance passengers on the way, were allowed a fourth outside passenger; and eventually many of the mails, like the stages, carried from eight to twelve outsides. This, however, did not suffice, for those passengers did not often present themselves; and at last the contractors really did not care to obtain the Post Office business, finding it pay better to devote their attention to fast day-coaches on their own account.
THE MAIL. After J. L. Agasse, 1824.
Thus the Post Office found itself in a novel and unwonted position. Coach-proprietors and contractors, instead of anxiously endeavouring to obtain the mail-contracts, held aloof, and the Post Office surveyors, when renewals were necessary, found they had to make the advances and do the courting. Then the tables were turned with a vengeance! For Benjamin Horne’s “Foreign Mail,” carrying what were called the “black bags” (i.e. black tarpaulin to protect the mail from sea-water) between London and Dover, 1s. 3¾d. per double mile was paid; 11⅙d. for the Carmarthen and Pembroke; and 8d., and then 9d., for the Norwich Mail, by Newmarket, strongly opposed as it was by the Norwich “Telegraph,” and therefore loading badly on that lonely road. For the Chester, originally contracted for at 1s. a mile, then down to 3d., and in 1826 up to 4d., 6d. was paid, on account of passengers going by the direct Holyhead Mail, and the Holyhead itself was raised to the same figure when fast day-stages had begun to run from Shrewsbury.